


"We Never Stopped Being Enemies."

by Eilinelithil



Series: Lover's Leap [3]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Negotiations, Work That One Out If You Can, love and anger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:41:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25824538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eilinelithil/pseuds/Eilinelithil
Summary: Belle and Rumplestiltskin are suddenly plunged deep into a crisis point in the relationship between two other individuals; in literally a matter of life and death. Belle and Rumple both suffer from strong feelings of deja vu in resolving this couple's issue.
Relationships: Belle/Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold
Series: Lover's Leap [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1863370
Comments: 11
Kudos: 7





	"We Never Stopped Being Enemies."

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the third of the AU-gust fics. The prompt was Soulmate.

Rumplestiltskin had begun to relish these times. The times where he would sit and spin, while Belle pottered here and there, dusting the mantle, offering the occasional snippets of conversation. Oh, sometimes he _pretended_ to be irritated at her chattering, telling her she was disturbing his spinning, but the last few times Belle hadn’t fallen for it one little bit, and surprisingly, that suited him just fine.

“…And then I wondered, why it is you never have guests? I know you have friends, at least there’s one person I’ve seen with free access to the castle?”

“Jefferson?” he guessed.

“Yes. Why don’t you invite him. It’s Harvest soon and…” she paused in her dusting to turn and face him. “It would be… nice to have—”

She cut off mid sentence, frozen mid wave of her feather duster so abruptly that as he stood up from the wheel, Rumplestiltskin looked towards the doors, expecting to find Regina stalking toward him. There was no one. He looked toward the mantle, which she had been dusting to see if there were anything on there that could have caused this. Still nothing, and they had long since moved the amber goblet that seemed to trigger the Fairy’s curse to the cabinet, so there would be no accidental contacts to send them careening off into some other reality.

It had already happened too often as it were.

“Belle?” He frowned, and moved with growing urgency toward her. “Belle…!”

He waved a hand in front of her face, with no effect. So, still suspecting foul play, foul magic, he snapped his fingers, sending the power of a neutralizing spell her way. She wavered once, and would have dropped to the ground like a stone had he not been so vigilant, and caught her up in his arms.

As he carried her toward the chaise longue he felt the first creeping tingle of magic not his own…

* * *

She had been carrying a feather duster, but now she held a baby, cradled tightly against her chest. He was wrapped in a blanket and seemed entirely undisturbed by the jostling caused by her hurried progress along the corridor that stretched ahead of her. It was unlike any hallway she had ever seen, and if she didn’t know better, she would have said the walls were made of some kind of metal.

Her heart started racing as the emotion of the woman she was caught up with her and subsumed her, their melding more complete by the second. She was being pursued, and she knew without a doubt that she couldn’t afford to be caught.

Desperately, one by one, she began to press a hand to the panels of the wall, and it took her just a moment to understand that she was looking for one that would open. She glanced behind her as she heard footsteps coming closer. If she couldn’t find it…

Just when she believed she would not, the panel beside her gave a quiet click and swung out just a little - just enough. She reached in and pulled down the short ladder that would help her to climb inside, and once she was, she carefully set the baby down beside her so that she would have both hands with which to pull up the ladder, and close the panel.

She held her breath, fearing that if she even breathed too loudly, her pursuer would hear her, find her. Even as she did, her child began to fuss, and she picked him up and cradled him close once again, hushing him gently and trying not to let _her_ fear get the better of both of them.

* * *

The castle dissolved into a blue-lit room filled with unfamiliar surfaces; tables that held strange picture frames that were connected to a horizontal rectangle filled with small square buttons, each with a letter or a figure displayed on them. These stood next to another surface filled with larger, triangular buttons… and for a moment nothing made sense to him.

The dislocation was dizzying, and in an attempt to steady himself, Rumplestiltskin looked down at himself, at his hands. Those, at least were strangely familiar. Not exactly as his scaled hands with sharpened nails, but not the color of human flesh either. The sight began to calm him and he stalked over to the full length glass window that looked down on the room below, where a huge circle stood on a raised platform.

_Gate_

The word came to him out of nowhere as the meld began to take a better hold, as awareness of who and _what_ he was came to him. He looked at his reflection in the window, at the brown leather he wore, form fitting and functional; at his halfway human appearance, barely a mark left on his cheeks where there should have been slits beneath the butterfly shape of his eye sockets. Even those were gone, and his hair was short cropped and held more brown than the proud white of his kin. He was not as he had been created, but he had done this; manipulated his appearance to be more pleasing to _her_. His one. His only. His _Queen_.

He was here for her, and for the child he had been instrumental in creating. He _would_ have his way.

He returned to the console and the computers, everything more familiar to him as the seconds and minutes ticked past. He saw movement behind him, reflected in the glass, and he turned to face the creatures - soldiers of his own creation, hybrids between his kind and the humans he had taken as prisoners - they were empty handed, and his temper mounted.

“Where is she?” he demanded, and his voice held a strange, tonal harmony all of it’s own.

“We don’t know,” one of them said. “We searched everywhere.”

“Are you telling me she just disappeared?” It was a phrase Rumplestiltskin himself might have used, but the delivery of who he was now was filled with simmering anger, and not the flamboyant sarcasm with which he would have imbued the words.

“I'm saying that we searched every room and corridor within the stun field. We couldn't find her anywhere.” Even though the words suggested otherwise, the tone was one of utter respect and obedience, as he would expect.

_Darker, dearie,_ he thought of his new self. _Much darker._

Despite the respect he was shown, his anger raced toward a peak.

“She knows this city well. She's hiding somewhere.” Another feeling, familiar to Rumplestiltskin welled inside. The need to vent, to destroy, and he picked up the laptop from the desk beside him and hurled it across the control room to watch it shatter against the wall. “ _Toying_ with me!” he snarled.

His soldiers shifted nervously, and in his tone, as one of them spoke, Rumplestiltskin heard fear. “We’ll keep looking.”

“No.” He barked. “I’ll handle this.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Flush her out,” he announced, and moved to the other console, rapidly entering a sequence on the controls there. After barely a moment, an alarm began to sound.

* * *

Belle started as first an urgent tones began to sound, and then his voice… the one two whom she was drawn even though she _knew_ that she should not, came over the city’s comms. Myriad thoughts flashed through her mind. He had always treated her with a dichotomy of respect and admiration, and unyielding possessiveness. She should despise him, but she could not. If she were honest, perhaps, the opposite was true. It was a familiar feeling to her, as much as it was alien to the woman she was here.

She started again as he called her name, his voice reaching her over the city’s comms.

_”I know you can hear me. That alarm – if you're not aware – is the self destruct device. I've armed it; set it for ten minutes.”_

She swallowed, holding her baby closer. How could he _do_ this? _Why_ would he if she and the child were who he _wanted?_

_“That is the amount of time you have to consider the offer I'm about to make you.”_

A deal? He was offering her a deal.

“Rumple?” she whispered softly against her baby’s downy hair. Was _this_ what they were to correct? Was the pull this woman felt toward that man, that _beast_ the same as her own… true love?

_”If you will surrender yourself and your child to me, I'll disarm the device, sparing the lives of everyone on this base. If not, you, your baby and everyone else will die.”_

Belle took a breath as a realization his her, hard, twisting her insides into a knot. The conditions that Rumplestiltskin had set upon her for her part in failing to protect him from the fairy curse - that she would share it - if that were true then…

“It isn’t _his_ to correct the wrong here… it’s _mine_.” She murmured, but could she be that brave, and was she reading the situation right?

It didn’t matter. Lives were at stake. Her child’s, her people, her _friends_.

Slowly, carefully, she climbed out of the space behind the panel, holding her son tightly as she did.

* * *

“We don’t have much time,” Rumplestiltskin blinked, and turned to frown at his underling. He had almost forgotten he was there. “We need to leave this place.”

He shook his head and turned back as if he could _see_ the one he needed, the one he desired as he spoke aloud again.

“Time is short,” he said, calling her by name again. Hoping to appeal to the natural leader in her; the one that would move the heavens to keep those she cared for safe. “I don't understand – I would think the choice is an easy one.”

Rumplestiltskin began to feel a sense of familiarity in the feeling behind the words he spoke as this… man. Was this their task then? To reunite these two?

“If nothing else, consider your child. By remaining in hiding, you are sentencing him to die. What kind of mother would do such a thing?”

“Turn off the self destruct system.” The voice behind him was steady in its sense of command, in spite of the trepidation in it. He spun to face her, wary of her presence, even now. He saw no sense of recognition in her, and did not recognize Belle in this stranger until…

“My people… my friends… they will all live?”

“You have my word,” he answered, feeling a sense of relief wash over him. It was Belle, he was certain of it. The words so familiar to him that the sense of deja vu was almost overwhelming.

She nodded once, and took a step closer to him, and he sensed it as an act of good faith from her as she said, “Turn off the self destruct and I will go…”

* * *

Belle’s eyelids fluttered and she took a deep breath, feeling the warm fire nearby, the softness of the chaise on which she lay, and hearing the crackle of wood, burning nearby. She also felt a heavy weight resting across her waist.

She looked down, her heart filling with a sudden pang of softness as she saw Rumplestiltskin resting where he must have fallen, his arm and his head lay across his lap. It was turned her way

“I will go, with you, forever,” she finished as a whisper, lifting a hand to run her fingers through Rumplestiltskin’s hair before he could awaken.

**Author's Note:**

> Technically this is a kind of crossover of sorts, and I'll give extra brownie points to anyone can tell me with that show or episode. Actual dialogue used remains the property of the orignal network and writers.


End file.
